


Updraft

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Airplanes, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 15:48:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11211225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: Alicia has a pilot's license.





	Updraft

The year before Bob was traded to the Pens, Alicia starred in a romance about a lady pilot who flew spy planes in World War II France. She fell in love on set—not with her male costar, who was a bit of a drip, but with the replica Westland Lysander IIIA on loan from the RAF Museum. When she returned to Canada after the filming wrapped, she made the first truly millionaire-like purchase of her life, unless one counted her name next to Bob's on the deed for the house.

She found an airfield outside Montreal that offered private lessons. Her instructor was an apple-cheeked man in his seventies with a facial scar that hinted of a storied past. In the present, he made his living mostly by ferrying geologists in and out of the taiga and teaching rich kids like Alicia how to fly their floatplanes. He giggled at Alicia's flawless Parisian French and yammered with his colleagues in incomprehensible Joual. She won him over by talking about the Lysander.

She took to the air like she'd taken to the catwalk and the stage. Casting directors called her bird-boned. Little had they known. She had always loved driving; knew for a fact that Bob had barely held back from proposing on their fourth date, at a racetrack in LA. But flight was something else again. There was no way to describe it except in clichés: freedom; mastery; peace.

In the summer of 2009, Alicia spent hour after hour flying solo over the Gaspé in her ten-year-old Skycatcher, eyes on the horizon, and the Saint Lawrence River gleaming below like a muscular, smooth-scaled serpent. The second seat of the tiny plane was always empty. Bob didn't like the noise or the way the seat folded his big body in half, and was inclined to hover within calling distance of Jack anyway, no matter how often Alicia tried to drag him out to let the boy have space. Jack she invited to go with her sometimes, but he was always tired from therapy, or labouring over his homework, or about to go for a run, or count the spiral patterns in the plaster on his ceiling. Alicia let him. They went for a walk together every morning, and that had to be enough.

Between flights, between family counseling, and a film cameo for a friend, and the charitable work she refused to let slide, she read Saint-Exupéry. His were among the first books she'd ever read in French; _Wind, Sand and Stars_ was a reason she'd studied the language at school in the first place. He wrote about flying. He wrote about adventurer-pilots who flew the mail across the Andes in newly-invented monoplanes; he wrote of Aéropostale's men-only outposts, brotherly bonds and masculine posturing and reckless derring-do. And over and over, he wrote about crashing. Sometimes in the Andes, but more often in the treacherous stretch of the Sahara between Benghazi and Cairo, traversed only by fools with death wishes in flimsy flying machines, and Bedouins on camels. He wrote of ecstasy and fear, the long fall, the frigid, deathly beauty of the desert sky at night, and of dying slowly of hunger and thirst and hallucinating fables of small, lonely, tow-headed boys a long, long way from home.

Alicia was careful, in the air. Sometimes she cried, but she carried cloth handkerchiefs and let the tears run down her cheeks, and never let her attention stray from piloting. She never lost track of time, and she never stayed aloft longer than planned. The river and the deep green hills and the high cirrus clouds, so different from Saint-Exupéry's stark landscapes, did their work, and she came back to earth calmer than she left.

On a clear day in fall, when the leaves had turned brilliant and were drawing tourists to all the little white bed and breakfasts from Trois-Rivières to Percé, after the hockey season had started, after Jack had decided to coach, at least for a little while, Alicia found her son on the sofa in the living room, engrossed in a book about wartime aviation Alicia had purchased decades before. "Goin' up in the Skycatcher," she told him. "It might not be a Lysander, but—want to see what she's got?" 

Jack looked up at his mother. She'd asked a thousand times before, but today, he looked at her and—she held her breath. Jack looked back at the book in his lap and huffed to himself, and smiled, and stood.


End file.
